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SimCity Social, The Sims Social, and Pet Society are going offline on June 14, EA announced this morning. The three Playfish Facebook games are being retired after player counts and activity fell off, EA said. Today's news means all of Playfish's Facebook games, according to the EA subsidiary's website, have either shut down or are scheduled to - with the exception of Madden Social 13, which an EA press release notes as developed by EA Tiburon.

EA bought Playfish for $300 million in 2009 before signing a "strategic" five year deal with Facebook in 2010.

Weird, so many people said social facebook games were the future and console players were dinosaurs. Somewhere, PC players are nodding knowingly.

Lexicographic ordering is a pretty simple mathematical technique used to determine the best order a set of values should come in. It's most commonly used in libraries or dictionaries for arranging books and words, for instance, with the alphabet determining the order of the letters.

Murphy created two programs, LearnFun and PlayFun, and began recording himself playing the first level (world 1-1) of Super Mario Bros. The NES puts out 60 frames of 2048 bytes per second, and each of these was fed into LearnFun. Everything in the NES's memory—the buttons being pressed, the number of lives left, the score, the locations of enemies, Mario's position as coordinates, and so on—is taken in by the LearnFun algorithm.

PlayFun then plays the game, and uses the knowledge from LearnFun to try and increase the values it knows it has to increase—Mario's score, and how far scrolled to the right Mario is in the level. "It's trying to find the sequence of inputs to make those values go up in the RAM," Murphy explains in the video.

The results are impressive. After some tweaking, Mario plays the first level just like a real person, jumping on enemies like Goombas and hitting boxes for coins. The program even learns how to take advantage of bugs and glitches, like timing jumps so that Mario begins falling again at the exact time that he makes contact with a Goomba. Mario's invincible when he's falling, so the touch kills the Goomba, not Mario, and it gives him a further jump boost.

In Tetris, though, the method fails completely. It seeks out the easiest path to a higher score, which is laying bricks on top of one another randomly. Then, when the screen fills up, the AI pauses the game. As soon as it unpauses, it'll lose—as Murphy says, "the only way to the win the game is not to play."

Make your Sims smile with the Attractions Set—five fun tourist hot spots that will not only make your Sims happy, but bring in more tourists. If you want to plop these playful attractions in your city, you need to be located in the United States and you’ll also need to purchase a specially marked Crest or Oral-B product to receive a code good for all five attractions.

This is why I have such a deep loathing for EA at the moment. It's not that you get neat stuff for buying a certain brand of toothpaste, it's that the game seems designed around these sponsorship deals and monetization strategies. It doesn't feel like EA and Maxis sat down and tried to create the very best version of SimCity possible, it feels like they designed the game that would be the easiest to control, monetize, and sell to advertisers.

...

EA isn't just selling games to players, they're selling players to advertisers. And it's not just a passive advertisement, as the only way to get to this content is to actively go to the store and buy a certrain brand of product. That, in many ways, feels worse to me. Cities filled with ads are actually realistic, as real-life cities are filled with billboards and screens. This is something else, and it's in ever worse taste considering the problems the game has faced since launch.

Those were the ones that crossed my mind, yes - except for Hunger Games, didn't think of that one. Disney also used this for movie 2 and 3 in Pirates of the Caribbean. I guess it works partially because the production period after the filming is so long, cutting and making effects, so one can shoot material for both movies and then produce them sequentially.

Also notable that many of these did not use any of the biggest stars, which should help with scheduling. Noone from Twilight was known before the movies. LOTR had quality actors, but not exactly stars, and several of the better known were only present for short periods of shooting (at least Liv Tyler, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett). Never bothered with the Harry Potter movies, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were organised the same (and likely also shot on soundstages in England rather than a deserted area of New Zeeland).

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

If there's ever a person who knows how to wear out a franchise, it would be JJ Abrams. They wore out Star Trek on TV. Throwing out 2 TV series a year and then Enterprise. Of course I think it was all that stupid time travel story line in Enterprise that killed it. People got sick of Star Trek.

For one, the Rift is now making use of a big 7" diagonal display, up from the 5.6" display found on prototypes. While the early units provided a roughly 110 degree viewing range, the new display is enough to cover my entire field of vision, even when I shift my eyes left or right to try and make out the edges of the view. The new display also provides smoother pixel switching than earlier demos did, resulting in less blurring and streaking when I move my head about. I'm told that there was about a 60 millisecond delay between an input and the resulting pixels on the demo running on an Nvidia 680 graphics card.

These improvements came at some expense to the weight of the unit, which is now 90 grams heavier than it was before the screen was expanded. Frankly, I didn't find the added mass to be distracting. Putting the unit on feels comparable to donning a pair of sleek ski goggles. After a quick adjustment with some twistable knobs, I was able to get rid of an annoying nose pinch and I found it quite easy to forget the unit was on my head at all.

I usually have to close my eyes and blink away a headache after a few minutes of looking at a simulated 3D image on a screen, whether it's shown with or without glasses. I didn't have this problem with the Rift, though, possibly because each eye was actually getting a distinct, unfiltered image. There were no interference or flickering issues that often show up when using in 3D glasses or pixel-grated LCD displays.

The result is an incredible sense of apparent distance between the surrounding cockpit and the buildings in the hazy distance. It only gets more convincing thanks to the excellent head tracking, which refused to get confused no matter how fast or oddly I shook my head about. It all combines into an amazing sense of freedom and immersion when I flew into the air with a jet pack, and a strong sense of vertigo as I went into free fall and saw the ground rushing up to meet my feet.

Unfortunately, the Hawken demo also highlighted what's currently the biggest problem with the Rift: resolution. The 1280×800 display sounds decent enough for a 7" screen. But when that display is sitting just a few inches from your face—and split down the middle into separate images for both eyes—it doesn't quite cut it. The short viewing distance makes it pretty easy to make out individual pixels, including the thin black lines that surround each one. People used to retina displays and high-def PC monitors will probably find everything just a little bit muddy. This is more than a purely cosmetic concern, too; when I looked down at my cockpit in Hawken, the ammunition readout looked like a blurry, unreadable blob. When I took off the headset briefly and looked at the source image on the monitor in front of me, however, it was crystal clear.

This is a future gaming technology I can get into. I don't think the tech/price is there for even mid next gen, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it made it into something like the PS5.

The budget of Game of Thrones has been compared to that of the TV series Rome.[17] The pilot reportedly cost HBO between US$5 and 10 million,[16] and the total budget for the first season has been estimated at US$50–60 million.[18] In the second season, the show obtained a 15% increase in budget in order to be able to stage the most important battle in the "clash of kings," the civil war that is the season's focus.[19]

Yes, I get the impression that his crazy days are behind him. I think he follows the formula of some other successful stars - make a few big name movies now to make money, and then burn it shooting narrower things (e.g Clooney). He's so consistently bankable that he can probably name his terms right now. That never lasts, but why not milk it while you can?

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

In March, shortly after SimCity’s disastrous launch (servers couldn’t cope, the game barely ran, features had to be removed, and the always-on DRM was seriously crippling the game), EA and Maxis’ PR went into damage protection mode. And one refrain we saw over and over was a line from Maxis’ studio head, Lucy Bradshaw, that the ‘single-player’ game had to “offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers.”

On 12th March, RPS revealed that this statement simply wasn’t true. Via a source from inside Maxis, we learned that the server was doing no such thing, and that the calculations were running on the player’s PC. Two days later these claims were confirmed by a modder who had the game running indefinitely offline. It was clear that the message coming from Maxis simply wasn’t true.

So how did EA or Maxis handle this situation? With silence.

And if simply telling the truth isn’t considered an available option, silence is by far the most effective response in this industry.

Not reporting the story couldn’t be immediately dismissed as capitulation, being in the pocket of EA, cowardliness, etc. (Not that it excludes it, of course.) What most sites would have done was immediately fire off an email to EA and Maxis asking for them to provide comment. We, of course, had done the same. And here’s where the power of silence played its first part.

EA and Maxis simply ignored all those emails. Sites may have received a, “We’re waiting for a response,” from their regional PRs, but that was it. And so if you’re running GamePow.com, and you’ve decided you can’t run RPS’s story without giving EA a response, ta-da – no story on GamePow. And EA knows that.

I've been meaning to say, for all the revelation the perpetual off-line debug mode was, I'm somewhat surprised no one has gotten any further in giving SimCity a proper offline mode since.

Edit: Also Nintendo announced they aren't holding the traditional big press event this year.

At E3 this year, we are not planning to launch new hardware, and our main activity at E3 will be to announce and have people experience our software. Many people are certainly very interested in learning more about the Wii U titles that we are going to announce. We will use E3 as an ideal opportunity to talk in detail mainly about the Wii U titles that we are going to launch this year, and we also plan to make it possible for visitors to try the games immediately. As a brand new challenge, we are working to establish a new presentation style for E3.

First, we decided not to host a large-scale presentation targeted at everyone in the international audience where we announce new information as we did in the past.
Instead, at the E3 show this year, we are planning to host a few smaller events that are specifically focused on our software lineup for the U.S. market. There will be one closed event for American distributors, and we will hold another closed hands-on experience event, for mainly the Western gaming media. Also, I did not speak at last year’s presentation, and I am not planning to speak at these events at the E3 show this year either. Apart from these exclusive events for visitors, we are continuing to investigate ways to deliver information about our games directly to our home audience around the time of E3. We will share more information about them once they have officially been decided.

For a company whose latest console is being viewed as stagnating I'm not sure low key demos is the right strategy.

The Madden series will not be appearing on Wii U in 2013, according to an EA Sports representative.

After speculation that the system would miss out on this year's Madden NFL 25, it is now confirmed that the series will skip Nintendo platforms for the first time since 1991.

Last year, a version of Madden NFL 13 came out for both Wii and Wii U. The Nintendo 64, GameCube, and Wii all had versions of Madden throughout their lives. In 2011, the 3DS launched with a version of Madden, and after that, EA confirmed that the series was not appearing on Nintendo's portable again.

@TFD
They completely botched the release.
-No compelling exclusive software or service to get people to pick up the box
-The name has been misunderstood by their intended audience
-Abysmal marketing
-Unnecessarily complicated controller. (Even Nintendo hasn't shown me any compelling reason for it).

With third parties, its a chicken-n-egg problem......console sales get support. But console sales, specifically for Nintendo are generated by first party AAA titles (not B titles).

I have to admit, If they had a *real* new Mario game when the WiiU launched, I would have picked one up. But alas, even this year, all they can muster up is a remake of a 10-year-old Zelda game (WW).

If Sony was wasting its time with motion and 3D, Nintendo has been wasting it's time(and resources) on things like 'MiiVerse', the TV control thing, and a host of other crappy software initiatives, instead of focusing.

Gamers tend to say the GameCube was a failure, it wasn't. It's probably the best gaming console i've owned. It launched with a Mario title and had compelling exclusives (Rogue Squadron, Metroid Prime, RE4,etc...). The WiiU however, has none of those aspects going for it.

What worries me, is the fact that they will be having a low-key E3... it could be because they will be overshadowed by the other two. But I feel it's because they have nothing worth showing(software) to justify spending on a keynote.